The summer of 1997 was the summer I turned 14. We began the summer by going to ATI’s big yearly national conference in Knoxville, at the University of Tennessee. ATI took over a significant portion of the campus for that one week every summer. School was still in session for the public schools in Ohio, so my mom and I went, while my dad stayed in Cincinnati to work. This was my first significant exposure to ATI as a whole.

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Kirill Ignatyev. HA Note: This is the third in a nine part series telling Ruth Burger’s, a plaintiff in the IBLP/Gothard lawsuit, story of abuse while in ATI. It is cross-posted from Joe Sands’ blog Incongruous Circumspection and was originally posted on June 3, 2012. Edited by Wende Benner, HA Editorial Staff CW: Descriptions of physical abuse